The earliest iteration of the biggest western MMO, World of Warcraft, splits the difference on the whole chosen one thing. You and thirty nine other players are needed to kill the biggest bad guys, and you get flavor text(that most don't read) saying "Good job hero!", possibly acknowledging that it was a group effort.
Then in later versions you become an extremely consequential supporting character to the writers' pet heroes. A lot of players prefer old school WoW. One reason, even though most don't realize it, is that the awful storytelling of WoW is mostly in the background in the initial version of the game (with less terrible voice acting). Instead, it really is about the "World".
The links to Western civilisation collapsing once, twice, three times don't work for me; possibly because I'm outside the USA? You've piqued my curiosity.
David Brin’s The Postman was a reaction to Mad Max style apocalyptic fiction: the survivalists are the bad guys and the hero is a guy who takes a dead mailman’s shirt and bag and tries to bring back order and civilization, initially by delivering the mail.
The earliest iteration of the biggest western MMO, World of Warcraft, splits the difference on the whole chosen one thing. You and thirty nine other players are needed to kill the biggest bad guys, and you get flavor text(that most don't read) saying "Good job hero!", possibly acknowledging that it was a group effort.
Then in later versions you become an extremely consequential supporting character to the writers' pet heroes. A lot of players prefer old school WoW. One reason, even though most don't realize it, is that the awful storytelling of WoW is mostly in the background in the initial version of the game (with less terrible voice acting). Instead, it really is about the "World".
"Making all things correspond to what they should"--is there anything more Chinese than that?
This phrasing is also extremely Egyptian (as in Pharaonic Ancient Egypt).
The links to Western civilisation collapsing once, twice, three times don't work for me; possibly because I'm outside the USA? You've piqued my curiosity.
Weird! They link, in order, to: Gibbon's Decline and Fall; Eric Cline's 1177 BC; Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.
Fall of Rome, Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Enlightenment (he sees it as a bad thing).
David Brin’s The Postman was a reaction to Mad Max style apocalyptic fiction: the survivalists are the bad guys and the hero is a guy who takes a dead mailman’s shirt and bag and tries to bring back order and civilization, initially by delivering the mail.